Modern information technology (IT) management systems allow users to interact with large amounts of data through user interfaces and visualizations. These tools facilitate complex data exchanges with back-end storage systems as well as interactively explore the received data. While such interfaces provide many benefits, it remains a challenge for users to explore and analyze the history of their activities.
Breadcrumbs or breadcrumb trail in IT management systems provide information to users regarding how they arrived at a current state of their IT environment. In other words, a breadcrumb trail is a trail or history of activities or events associated with the IT environment that the user is interacting with. To accurately analyze the information provided by the breadcrumb trail, users need to know contextual information including, but not limited to: i) the initial state of the IT environment they were working with; ii) the actions they performed and the results obtained, and iii) data that was visible on their screen at the time they decided to perform modifications to the IT environment. Often systems provide logs of data transactions or interface events, and users rely on memory to determine the contextual information that led to such actions. The dynamic nature of IT environments makes it difficult for users to have a clear picture of actual information they used in their decision making process.
An alternative to logging user activities is using breadcrumb trails of static snapshots of the interface with which the user interacts. Snapshots may be captured and labeled by the users. However, both approaches fail to capture contextual information that helps reconstruct the data and human factors that influenced user actions.
As such, there is a need for a breadcrumb trail navigation tool that integrates and structures data exchanges with user interaction events such that users may trace the factors that influenced critical decisions and to trace back events that may have been sources of error.
These and other drawbacks exist.